Super-short update on books & reading

Over Saturday and Sunday, I managed to do some amount of cleaning in every room of our house. I was listening to the audio version of The Help by Kathryn Stockett, and it was fabulous. While dusting bookshelves, I started pulling out books to remove from my collection — but not too many of them, I admit. I finished the audiobook today, and also read the last ten pages this morning of the novel Fury by Salman Rushdie. (I enjoyed it, but didn’t love it, so I already have it in my small “to be weeded” pile.) So for several hours today, I’ve been “between books,” and am not sure what to pick up next.

Finishing those two books, dusting the shelves and weeding some items from my collection, I began reflecting on my “Read 20 Pages Project” (R20PP). I haven’t done as much “sampling” as I’d planned to do when I came up with that project idea. Today, I started thinking, I’d like to take a day off from work and spend the whole thing by myself, reading a chapter or a handful of pages from lots of my TBR books, to get a feel for them, and decide if I really need to keep them, if I think I’d actually enjoy them enough to keep them on the shelves and spend more time with them in the not-too-distant future. Since 2008, I’ve been keeping lists on LibraryThing of how many books I read each calendar year. Now I’m thinking, I shouldn’t focus on finishing so many, and should sample more of them. Perhaps that will be a plan for the new year, which will be coming sooner than we expect: instead of trying to read 40 or 50 books, maybe I’ll make a resolution to “sample” or “examine” 75 or 100.

Just some bookish ideas floating through my head. Getting late, gotta get ready for bed.